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The Northern Cherokee Nation of the Old Louisiana Territory is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization [1] of individuals who self-identify as Cherokee but are not state or federally recognized as a Native American tribe or government. The headquarters for the NCNOLT is in Columbia, Missouri.[ citation needed ]
Members live primarily in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.[ citation needed ] The current chief is Beverly Baker Northup. [2] [3] [4] [5]
While members of the group claim Cherokee ancestry, genealogical research has not corroborated any of these claims. [5]
The group incorporated on September 15, 1978, as the Northern Cherokee Tribe of Indians. [6] On March 17, 2014, the organization changed its name to Northern Cherokee Nation of the Old Louisiana Territory. [7]
The Northern Cherokee Nation of the Old Louisiana Territory continues to claim they have state recognition in Missouri, due to a 1983 letter from then-Governor Kit Bond where he personally acknowledged existence of the group; but this letter did not grant them state recognition (which is a legislative process) nor did it grant them recognition by the continuously-existing Cherokee tribes as Cherokee people. The group's claim of Missouri state recognition is called misleading because, according "to a master list maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures, Missouri recognizes no Indian tribes except those recognized by the federal government." [8] [9]
This organization is neither federally or state recognized.
Federal recognition of an Indian tribe can be achieved in one of three ways; by recognition through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, recognition through Acts of Congress or recognition through Courts of Law. State recognition of an Indian tribe differs from state to state but fall into one of four methods, namely: passage of State Statutes and Acts, recognition through State Regulatory Processes, recognition through Joint and Concurrent Resolutions, and recognition through Treaties, Proclamations and Executive Orders. In both cases recognition is accomplished by meeting the requisites for any one of the relative methods of recognition. That means that the BIA can recognize a group and yield that group recognition or Congress can pass a bill recognizing the group. [10]
The Missouri American Indian Council asserts "there are no domestic Indian tribes recognized by the state," insisting that an executive mandate does not constitute the appropriate avenue of recognition but that it must be done by the passage of a state law in the state of Missouri. The NCNOLT has attempted multiple times, since around 1983, to clarify state recognition in Missouri (where it has a 200-year residency) and Arkansas but have not been successful. [11] They have received three declarations from different state governors acknowledging "Northern Cherokee Recognition Day" and the presence of the Northern Cherokee since the late 18th century in the states of Missouri and Arkansas and one county, Boone County in Missouri. [4] The Northern Cherokee Nation of the Old Louisiana Territory filed a Letter of Intent to Petition with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on February 19, 1992, but as of September 22, 2008, no decision had been reached, [12] because the group has submitted no documentation (as of February 15, 2007). [13]
Rocky Miller, a congressman and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, has said that the proclamation issued in June 1983 by then-governor Kit Bond where Bond "acknowledged the existence of the Northern Cherokee Tribe" as "an American Indian Tribe within the State of Missouri" and declared June 24, 1983 Northern Cherokee Recognition Day, "does not make the Northern Cherokee a state-recognized tribe" because "Missouri has no established process for recognizing state tribes, and a list of state-recognized tribes will vary, depending on who you ask." [14]
The three federally recognized Cherokee tribes do not acknowledge the claims of the Northern Cherokee Nation of the Old Louisiana Territory.
The Cherokee Nation, headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, issued a statement asserting that some Cherokee Heritage Groups are encouraged but those that use words that imply governance are not. [15] In an old version of the Cherokee Nation website, an explanation for what is a "true" or "false" tribe was explained. [16] In 2008 the leadership of the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians signed a resolution to oppose fabricated Cherokee 'tribes' and denounced state and federal recognition of any new "Cherokee" tribes or bands. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians did not participate in the resolution. [17]
In 2000 the U.S. census report 729,533 people self identified as Cherokee Indian. [18] This figure is also more than twice the population of current estimates of all three federally recognized tribes combined.
Chief [2] [4] [3] [5] Beverly Baker Northup self-published a book, We Are Not Yet Conquered (2001), and in the first chapter wrote her perspective on to the origins of the ancestry of the Cherokee people. Northup explains in this chapter that she believes that a group of Middle Eastern people (she suggests they could have been Sicarii and surviving defenders of Masada) crossed the Atlantic Ocean and intermarried with Indian peoples making up the Cherokee. [19] Northup's suggestion of Jewish ancestry for Cherokee people was featured in the book Weird Missouri and was compared to the Mormon belief system; [20] a similar idea also forms part of the beliefs of Christian Identity and British Israelism. The claimed connection between Amerindians and the Ten Lost Tribes has spread on Indian and Israelite oriented websites alike and has sparked disdain as well as approval. [21] [22] [23] [24]
Dr. Carol Morrow from the Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau suggested that eligibility for membership is determined by Beverly Baker Northup who has been voted out of office more than once and who has obtained $120,000 in federal grant money to be used for completing the tribe's federal recognition process, which has not yet been completed. [25] Northup believes that Governor Mel Carnahan's bill of acknowledgment speaks to her legitimacy in office as the question of her having been voted out of office predated 1996. [26]
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)The Cherokee people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in their homelands, in towns along river valleys of what is now southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, edges of western South Carolina, northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama consisting of around 40,000 square miles.
Indian Territory and the Indian Territories are terms that generally described an evolving land area set aside by the United States government for the relocation of Native Americans who held original Indian title to their land as an independent nation-state. The concept of an Indian territory was an outcome of the U.S. federal government's 18th- and 19th-century policy of Indian removal. After the American Civil War (1861–1865), the policy of the U.S. government was one of assimilation.
The term Five Civilized Tribes was applied by the United States government in the early federal period of the history of the United States to the five major Native American nations in the Southeast: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminoles. White Americans classified them as "civilized" because they had adopted attributes of the Anglo-American culture.
The Lumbee are a Native American people primarily centered in Robeson, Hoke, Cumberland, and Scotland counties in North Carolina.
Blood quantum laws or Indian blood laws are laws in the United States that define Native American status by fractions of Native American ancestry. These laws were enacted by the federal government and state governments as a way to establish legally defined racial population groups. By contrast, many tribes do not include blood quantum as part of their own enrollment criteria. Blood quantum laws were first imposed by white settlers in the 18th century. Blood Quantum (BQ) continues to be a controversial topic.
The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma is a federally recognized tribe of Cherokee Native Americans headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. According to the UKB website, its members are mostly descendants of "Old Settlers" or "Western Cherokees," those Cherokees who migrated from the Southeast to present-day Arkansas and Oklahoma around 1817. Some reports estimate that Old Settlers began migrating west by 1800, before the forced relocation of Cherokees by the United States in the late 1830s under the Indian Removal Act.
State-recognized tribes in the United States are organizations that identify as Native American tribes or heritage groups that do not meet the criteria for federally recognized Indian tribes but have been recognized by a process established under assorted state government laws for varying purposes or by governor's executive orders. State recognition does not dictate whether or not they are recognized as Native American tribes by continually existing tribal nations.
The Cherokee Nation, formerly known as the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is the largest of three federally recognized tribes of Cherokees in the United States. It includes people descended from members of the Old Cherokee Nation who relocated, due to increasing pressure, from the Southeast to Indian Territory and Cherokees who were forced to relocate on the Trail of Tears. The tribe also includes descendants of Cherokee Freedmen and Natchez Nation. As of 2023, over 450,000 people were enrolled in the Cherokee Nation.
The Native American tribes in Virginia are the Indigenous peoples whose tribal nations historically or currently are based in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States of America.
The Cherokee Freedmen controversy was a political and tribal dispute between the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen regarding the issue of tribal membership. The controversy had resulted in several legal proceedings between the two parties from the late 20th century to August 2017.
Cherokee heritage groups are associations, societies and other organizations located primarily in the United States. Such groups consist of persons who do not qualify for enrollment in any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. As the Cherokee Nation enrolls all people who can prove descent from a Cherokee ancestor, many of these groups consist of those who claim Cherokee ancestry but have no documentation to prove this alleged heritage. Some have had their claims of ancestry checked and proven to be false. A total of 819,105 Americans claimed Cherokee heritage in the 2010 Census, more than any other named tribe in the Census.
Native American identity in the United States is a community identity, determined by the tribal nation the individual or group belongs to. While it is common for non-Natives to consider it a racial or ethnic identity, for Native Americans in the United States it is considered to be a political identity, based on citizenship and immediate family relationships. As culture can vary widely between the 574 extant federally recognized tribes in the United States, the idea of a single unified "Native American" racial identity is a European construct that does not have an equivalent in tribal thought.
Native American recognition in the United States, for tribes, usually means being recognized by the United States federal government as a community of Indigenous people that has been in continual existence since prior to European contact, and which has a sovereign, government-to-government relationship with the Federal government of the United States. In the United States, the Native American tribe is a fundamental unit of sovereign tribal government. This recognition comes with various rights and responsibilities. The United States recognizes the right of these tribes to self-government and supports their tribal sovereignty and self-determination. These tribes possess the right to establish the legal requirements for membership. They may form their own government, enforce laws, tax, license and regulate activities, zone, and exclude people from tribal territories. Limitations on tribal powers of self-government include the same limitations applicable to states; for example, neither tribes nor states have the power to make war, engage in foreign relations, or coin money.
The Yowani were a historical group of Choctaw people who lived in Texas. Yowani was also the name of a preremoval Choctaw village.
The Delaware Tribe of Indians, formerly known as the Cherokee Delaware or the Eastern Delaware, based in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is one of three federally recognized tribes of the Lenape people in the United States. The others are the Delaware Nation based in Anadarko, Oklahoma, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community of Wisconsin. More Lenape or Delaware people live in Canada.
The Echota Cherokee Tribe of Alabama is a state-recognized tribe in Alabama and Cherokee heritage group. It is based in northern Alabama and gained state-recognition under the Davis-Strong Act in 1984.
The Mount Tabor Indian Community is a cultural heritage group located in Rusk County, Texas. There was a historical Mount Tabor Indian Community dating from the 19th century. The current organization established a nonprofit organization in Texas in 2015.
Cherokee descent, "being of Cherokee descent", or "being a Cherokee descendant" are all terms for individuals with some degree of documented Cherokee ancestry but do not meet the criteria for tribal citizenship. The terms are also used by non-Native individuals who self-identify as Cherokee despite lacking documentation or community recognition.
Native American tribes in Texas are the Native American tribes who are currently based in Texas and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas who historically lived in Texas.